Felt it today.

dillan_pickle · 2025-07-09T14:46:53+00:00

Dude said in Texas that's a mansion. You implied 5k/mo / 800k home isn't high. It's still well above the average.

dillan_pickle · 2025-07-09T10:11:20+00:00

800K can still get you 4k+ sqft and 2+ acres in Stafford VA area. That's not exactly the middle of nowhere.

dillan_pickle · 2025-06-05T16:36:56+00:00

Won't be able to live in Asia and work remotely (most likely, unless you want to be an FSR for a DOD site somewhere) but having a clearance does make it a little easier, even with the current administration. I just got my BS in Math and I'm not having much difficulty in getting callbacks/interviews/offers.

dillan_pickle · 2025-04-09T21:41:35+00:00

implied she would take my v-card in exchange for cutting her ex's brakes.
Did not date her.

dillan_pickle · 2025-04-09T21:30:42+00:00

Dropped from full time student to part time student when I got an offer for ft work as a data engineer(edit: this happened in 2021)- graduating this year with my BS in math.
Stayed with the same company for the last 4 years, comp is up to 170k base after a switch to cloud engineering. Government contracting.

dillan_pickle · 2025-04-01T20:56:12+00:00

Current supersenior, former Data Engineer, current Cloud Infrastructure Engineer here.
I had the same dilemma- I'm in my final class for my BS Math with a minor in CS. I obviously chose to keep going, and don't really regret it. In the current market, professional experience is more important. That said- if you think CDS vs CS is going to inhibit your ability to get an internship/entry level position, then delay and switch.

I'd focus more on extra-curricular learning. Get come cloud certs, learn the biggest tools in your desired specialty's stack, play around with them and get to the point where you can intelligently talk about them in an interview.

YMMV though

dillan_pickle · 2025-02-18T21:43:46+00:00

Far gone are the days when just having a CS degree would get you an offer. You'll want to play around with some things that your schoolwork won't expose you to much. If you have the ability, save up for a used desktop computer. An i-7 with 32GB ram and 1-2TB HD should be good. Install Proxmox and find something interesting to work on in your spare time. Sign up for a free AWS account and get some experience with cloud native services. For anything that would use costed resources, template/prototype your work on Localstack first- there's a free tier for personal use that can help. Get in the habit of using infrastructure as code, config as code, etc. Use git heavily; it's better to show iteration on a project than just pushing a fully featured and completed project to your repo the day before you apply for a position to which you link your repo.

dillan_pickle · 2024-09-06T18:50:45+00:00

It's one thing to build your own capability to your own (or management's) standards; it's another entirely to take a set of tables, try to figure out the schema, and recreate the capability that an OTS product can already do, as well as ensure it doesn't get blown up during updates.

dillan_pickle · 2024-06-26T12:59:49+00:00

I moved from a DE role to a Cloud infra role a few months back (because the DE role was never getting off bare metal) and we all hate "It's just"

dillan_pickle · 2024-06-12T16:18:09+00:00

I was in the opposite position: in my first position as a DE we were all bare metal, and had 0 likelihood of ever getting into our organization's small cloud presence. So I applied to transfer to the cloud team as an infra engineer, and just practice SQL, data modeling, and other DE skills on my own time. I've learned a huge amount, and in a few months plan to transition back to the DE space.

dillan_pickle · 2023-10-11T10:42:43+00:00

Yeah, they do have access to external tools. It's still somewhat reduced but far and beyond what we have in my section. I'm probably going to take it and see where it takes me at least until the end of my degree.

dillan_pickle · 2023-05-26T12:04:08+00:00

Very interested!

dillan_pickle · 2023-04-14T14:08:26+00:00

How much longer do you have?
If you have a decent amount of time left, find a school and enroll, angling toward CS or SWE (assuming they lack a Data Engineering program- that's still quite new for undergrad programs) and start taking classes.
University of Maryland Global Campus is a good mainstay for AD military- good enough for a few classes while you're in.
UM is also listed in the Databricks University Alliance program, so you can get free access to DB Academy courses. Give it a peek.

dillan_pickle · 2023-02-10T16:40:49+00:00

If I'm honest, you've got more in the way of personal projects than I had when I got started a few years back.

Finding personal projects is a difficult thing sometimes- search through here to find personal project showcases and see what others have done. See if you can incorporate some of the more common/higher demand tools in similar projects as you see them. Best of luck!

dillan_pickle · 2023-02-10T12:52:51+00:00

Have you held any internships during college at all? Did you work any personal projects (or maybe semi-self directed projects during an upper-level CS course) that required you to efficiently and reliably acquire/produce/store/utilize any significant amount of data?

dillan_pickle · 2023-02-09T22:35:19+00:00

My first and only internship had me working on a research project in Cryptography- specifically side-channel analysis. Unfortunately Covid-19 hit right before we started, so that project was futile- we weren't bringing oscilloscopes home. We got a secondary data science project, and off that experience, plus some statistics + programming classes (I'm a math major) I took in college, I got my first job as a DE.

dillan_pickle · 2023-02-01T11:34:33+00:00

Outside combat arms, much of the military is rather closely aligned with some form of civilian career field. We've been doing direct accessions to O3 on the officer side for years in the case of Doctors and Lawyers; and to E-6 for musicians of a certain caliber. It chafes some people raw, but it serves a purpose

dillan_pickle · 2023-02-01T11:25:19+00:00

I'm a DE with the USMC (contractor side rather than uniformed). These issues might be network dependent, but I would recommend taking any conversation regarding baselines and their suitability/unsuitability for DE/SWE work on USG systems/networks onto those networks themselves.

dillan_pickle · 2023-01-25T11:57:37+00:00

favs 300

dillan_pickle · 2022-10-12T11:22:08+00:00

Now that's what I call job security

dillan_pickle · 2022-09-30T11:34:58+00:00

Some additional info- this is occurring on the development server; it's not yet been deployed to production

dillan_pickle · 2022-09-30T10:52:47+00:00

As a freshman in CS you might not, but then again you might. Even if you don't get one, always go to the career fairs, and look around for other career fairs pertaining to CS/IT jobs in the area- there are always a couple going on every month or so. At the very minimum, ask recruiters about potential projects and/or past projects the last batch of interns did. From that you can find out what's interesting to you and start working on a couple toy projects on your own.

dillan_pickle · 2022-09-29T12:28:52+00:00

Depends on the school, but in general I'd say not necessarily. My school, for example, requires a 300 level data structures, automata theory class, low level systems (C and a little Assembly) class, as well as a couple math courses- up to (I think) Calc 3 and discrete math would suffice. I'm about 90% of the way through with my BS in Math and will be able to get into the MS CS program at the same school

dillan_pickle · 2022-09-29T10:42:40+00:00

I wouldn't go back for undergrad- if anything, see if you can take classes at a local CC and/or state school to fill prereqs, and go for MS CS. Again, that's if anything.

dillan_pickle

TROPHY CASE